


Reflect

by myadamantiumheart



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, vague canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 06:06:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myadamantiumheart/pseuds/myadamantiumheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's been gone. Tim's been thinking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reflect

**Author's Note:**

> It’s been forever since I’ve written anything but original things- but I’m pretty much stuck doing nothing bc of illness so I’m mobile-writing vague fic about Tim and Damian being gone and the New Year. 
> 
> (It’s short and vague and I am super not up on canon bc after Damian died I couldn’t do it anymore. )

The city screeches, muffled, underneath a blanket of grimy snow and heavy clouds. Icy-slick rooftops are less joyride and more deathtrap as the temperature drops, and even the heating circuits in the suits can’t keep him warm enough. 

Day (number too large), night (number too large), and Damian is still not snapping over the comms. 

He is not there, out there, out in the shadows of Gotham. He is not lurking around the corner of a crumbling concrete spire, ready to swoop out at a criminal with deadly accuracy, and Tim hasn’t seen his cheeks glow faintly with the exhilaration of the fight in (too many) days. Weeks. Months. It’s not that the comms are too quiet now, because Jason is still bitching over them occasionally when Tim can find the Outlaw’s frequency, and Stephanie and Dick are still hooked up to comms, and- Barbara and Bruce are omnipresent as usual. 

But he might be starting to miss it, that now-hollow little space where acerbic comments once trickled like welcome acid through his ears. 

There are six muggings and two corner store robberies, one attempted break in to the office of a city prosecutor, and three attempted carjackings before he makes it to the edge of the sea, stretching out black and empty before him. The water is so dark, so cold, so vast, and it feels like the sinking melancholy that’s been dripping down the back of his spine tonight. 

Maybe there wasn’t a lot of love lost, but Tim is best friends with loss, after all, he knows it well enough to see- he misses him. For all that wars and deadlocks litter the battlefield of their past, something in him wants for brothers and sisters, and that something had latched on to Damian without his consent, eventually. And he remembers being a scrawny kid who followed his heroes across this same barren jungle- and beyond the same annoyance over all their fights and all their flaws, they were  _both_  scrawny kids who bared teeth too fierce for their years and wanted the same god to welcome them as a father to a son would in golden years and troubled times alike.

He has a paper ninja star in one of his pockets, tucked away, something that Stephanie made him. Something she would have wanted to teach Damian to do; something like her attempts at giving Damian any part of the childhood he could have had if the bitter poison of vengeance long expired and held too close to the heart hadn’t struck him down. A paper shuriken folded in a moon bounce and flung with no aspirations of accuracy. 

(He found it on her desk earlier and he took it because it was sitting next to two others at the base of a picture frame tilted away from the window, the glass not dusty, the frame not neglected: the snarl on Damian’s face is more like a smile in that photo, and Stephanie and Dick’s eyes are crinkled up and Cassandra’s finger is obscuring just the upper left corner of the frame, and-

He found it on her desk earlier, and he took it with him.)

The ocean spray is not bracing in the cold, but rather stinging and harsh and beckoning with cruel winter fingers. It smells like ice and smog and that distinct Gotham smell of underlying corruption that fills his lungs every time he takes a breath when he’s free falling out over the city center. 

His fingers don’t shake when he throws the star out into the waves, and his breath is steady, and his eyes only close for the barest millisecond extra as he blinks back what are not tears. 

"To new beginnings." The comm crackles a little, the sharp information of another ongoing crime drowning out the barest hint of his hoarse voice. Tim turns back towards the city, his hands finding his grappling guns, and he doesn’t watch the paper star sink beneath the waves, paper rapidly soaking and sagging from its careful folds. 

 _Happy new year, Damian_ , he carefully doesn’t think. Just as he carefully doesn’t think about all the other people that did not watch the ball drop, on their televisions, or on their small wrist displays, when the ball did drop four hours ago, when the city was bustling and crowing with the excitement of another digit, another year, another beginning.

And suspended in the rocky waves of the bay, the paper star dissolves. 


End file.
